This Kiss-In Reveals the Power of Queer Love as Protest

Last weekend, Voices4 partnered with RUSA LGBT to hold a queer kiss-in and rally to protest violence against LGBTQ+ people in Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan — just some of the many countries contributing to the rising global tide of persecution against LGBTQ+ people. At the Uzbek Consulate in New York City, speakers and direct statements from asylees poignantly set the tone, grounding us in personal stories and in the meaning and impact of the protest. It wasn’t lost on us that in other countries, what we did could have resulted in our imprisonment, torture, extortion, and death. It was the reason we gathered in the first place.

In a spirit of defiance and love that was only electrified by the pouring rain, we kissed in a sea of wet lips and leather, amid chants of joyful resistance. When lips parted, we peacefully disbanded, baptised in liberation — clothes and spirits heavy with the work left to be done.

For me, our kiss-in is an extension of nonviolence, a principle so often invoked in protest movement yet so rarely probed and examined, even though it has been central to almost every successful activist movement in history.

Practicing nonviolence doesn’t mean staying quiet or settling and enduring. It means marching and chanting and agitating with all your anger and passion, but with the closely held belief that violence will never lead to the justice and peace we seek. We won’t break down fear and indignity by wielding the same, and violence will only deepen our trenches, fuel stagnation, and move us backward.

But there’s more to it than understanding that real progress won’t be made through violence. Rather than meeting those who harbor hate with hate of our own, and more than just ignoring or tolerating them, nonviolence actually calls us to love those we’re fighting against.

This idea took time for me to internalize, because it is such a profound act of compassion to love in the face of everything that negates love. But if we truly believe this world is worth fixing and that we all have the ability to recognize our common humanity, it’s the only way forward. This is the work — not just to resist the forces against us, but to answer them with a more powerful alternative.

So when we as a collective staged our kiss-in, the queer kiss for us is an act that is radical in its love and profound in its simplicity, a way to exemplify nonviolence through love. Because queer love is actively and constantly challenged by the heteronormative society we live in, LGBTQ+ people have a unique opportunity to physically manifest our faith and love through this form of protest. A queer kiss is not a sin or an abomination; not a crime or a perversion — but a sign of a love too free for the bounds of societal constructs, religions, laws, or predilections.

That’s why queer groups have been holding kiss-insfor years, and it’s why we held our own. Each kiss carries forward decades of hope and history, sparked by the belief that one day we’ll all be free.

Kiss 2 Resist directed and edited by David SabshonShot by William Hart and Masa JankovicPhotographs by Matt Bernstein

Vinnie Amendolare was the deputy director for presidential correspondence in the Obama White House. He currently lives in New York City where he works as a writer and serves as the head of research for Voices4 — an activist group working toward global queer liberation.

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